Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon. Many integrated circuits are manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer, and individual dies on the wafer are singulated by sawing between the integrated circuits along a scribe line. The individual dies are packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, or in other types of packaging, for example.
Lithography processes are widely used to form photoresist patterns on semiconductor wafers. Lithography processes include hard-baking processes to solidify the photoresist patterns.
Therefore, it is desirable to improve the hard-baking process.